CAA News Today

The combined March–June 2010 issue of The Art Bulletin, the leading publication of international art-historical scholarship, has just been published. It will be mailed to all individual CAA members who elect to receive the journal, and to all institutional members.

The central scene of Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas graces the cover and introduces the issue’s Interventions essay series. Byron Ellsworth Hamann applies postcolonial and materialist strategies in “The Mirrors of Las Meninas: Cochineal, Silver, and Clay” to consider the artist’s masterpiece within a transatlantic visual archive. A group of six scholars from such diverse disciplines as Precolumbian studies, Romance studies and literature, art history, and Aztec and Spanish colonial art respond to Hamann’s article with texts of their own.

The issue features two other major essays. In “Family Space: Buddhist Materiality and Ancestral Fashioning in Mogao Cave 231,” Winston Kyan considers the diverse integration of family references into the visual program of ninth-century Buddhist Mogao caves at Dunhuang, which marked a turning point in the construction of religious space in medieval China. For “Portrait of Luca Pacioli and Disciple: A New, Mathematical Look,” Renzo Baldasso examines the famous painting as a statement about the achievements of mathematical humanists as well as the subject of mathematics as a mode of thinking, as court activity, and as a form of education.

In the reviews section, Rebecca Zorach evaluates Margaret D. Carroll’s Painting and Politics in Northern Europe: Van Eyck, Bruegel, Rubens, and Their Contemporaries, and Jonathan Unglaub examines Maria H. Loh’s Titian Remade: Repetition and the Transformation of Early Modern Italian Art. In addition, Joel Smith reviews the history and evolution of the notion of objectivity as presented in Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison’s book Objectivity.

Please read the full table of contents for more details. The next two Art Bulletins for 2010 will appear in September and December.

The December 2009 issue of The Art Bulletin, the leading publication of art-historical scholarship, has just been published. It will be mailed to those CAA members who elect to receive it, and to all institutional members.

For the first time, a work of twenty-first-century art graces the cover of the esteemed journal—Kehinde Wiley’s Portrait of Andries Stilte (2005). The painting accompanies an essay by Krista Thompson exploring how contemporary artists such as Wiley and Luis Gispert combine the visual language of hip-hop with late Renaissance and Baroque painting techniques.

Four essays precede Thompson’s. Leading off is Michael Schreffler, who analyzes how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spaniards described the practice of Aztec painting by looking through the lens of European art theory. Next, Emma Barker contends that Jean-Baptiste Greuze evokes both the innocence and vulnerability of children in his A Child Playing with a Dog, while implicating the viewer in the child’s fate.

Matthew Rampley’s essay expresses an opposing view of the Vienna school of art history, not as progressive and aesthetically liberal, but as a proponent of an imperialist outlook, related to the cultural politics of Austria-Hungary in the early-twentieth-century. The next contributor is Roberta Wue, who investigates the ways late-nineteenth-century Chinese artists positioned themselves in the marketplace through the classifieds in the Shanghai newspaper Shenbao. She also examines the changing relationship between artists and urban audiences in the late Qing era.

The December issue of The Art Bulletin also contains six reviews of books about tapestries at the Tudor court, engravings of Native American Indians, the gardens of Versailles and panoramic landscape painting, Buckminster Fuller, Tony Conrad, and issues on museum ownership of antiquities. Please read the full table of contents for more details.

The September 2009 issue of The Art Bulletin, the leading publication of art-historical scholarship, has just been published. It will be mailed to those CAA members who elect to receive it, and to all institutional members.

Five articles make up the issue. Leading off is Rachel Kousser’s “Destruction and Memory on the Athenian Acropolis,” which argues that in the way it was commemorated, the Persians’ sack of the Acropolis in 480 BCE took on paradigmatic significance as an example of “Oriental violence.” Next is a text by Elena Boeck, who in “Simulating the Hippodrome: The Performance of Power in Kiev’s St. Sophia” analyzes strategies of display, appropriation, and simulation of Byzantine imperial symbols by Prince Iaroslav “the Wise” in the paintings of the hippodrome in Kiev’s St. Sophia.

In “Rubens and the Northern Past: The Michielsen Triptych and the Thresholds of Modernity,” Lynn F. Jacobs interrogates the miraculous thresholds of this work by Peter Paul Rubens, which negotiate relations between the donors and God and between the meanings inherent in the life and theology of Christ. Her essay is followed by “Nature and the Ideal in Khnopff’s Avec Verhaeren: Un Ange and Art, or the Caresses,” in which Brendan Cole examines the work of Fernand Khnopff from an iconographic perspective to reveal how the central concerns for all Symbolist artists—of duality and the reconciliation of opposites—are encoded in his paintings.

Last, Phoebe Wolfskill’s “Caricature and the New Negro in the Work of Archibald Motley Jr. and Palmer Hayden” evaluates the perplexing appearance of racial caricature in compositions by these two “New Negro” Renaissance painters and considers how pervasive stereotypes might inform self-perception. Hayden’s Nous quatre à Paris from ca. 1930 is the cover image for this issue.

Also included are seven reviews of books on Romanesque Partheny, Castilian culture, Inigo Jones, Utamaro, science in art, and more. Please read the full table of contents for more details.

The June 2009 issue of The Art Bulletin, the leading publication of art-historical scholarship, has just been published. It will be mailed to those CAA members who elect to receive it, and to all institutional members.

On the cover is a detail of a pillowcase designed ca. 1916 by the Swiss artist Sophie Taeuber, which accompanies an essay by Bibiana Obler that considers the difference between Taeuber’s and Hans Arp’s public and private identities through a set of collaborative and closely related works and why they kept their most “advanced” work to themselves.

For her contribution, Stephanie Leitch investigates Hans Burgkmair’s images of non-Western communities in the woodcut frieze The Peoples of Africa and India (1508), which neither played into iconographic presets nor invented new stereotypes. Two more essays round out the issue: Norma Broude explores the political dynamics of gender informing the intentions, subjects, production, and reception of Giambattista Tiepolo’s frescoes for the palazzina of the Villa Valmarana, and Laura Morowitz examines the extraordinary popularity and religious undercurrents of the Hungarian artist Mihály Munkácsy’s paintings Christ before Pilate and Christ on Golgotha in late-nineteenth-century America.

The June issue of The Art Bulletin also contains reviews of books on Chinese epigraphy, Giovanni Bellini, Lucas Cranach the Elder, and Marcel Duchamp. Please read the full table of contents for more details.

The March 2009 issue of The Art Bulletin, the leading publication of international art-historical scholarship, has been published and was mailed to CAA members earlier this month.

Special to this issue is the publication of Picasso’s Closet, a play by the Chilean American writer and Duke University professor Ariel Dorfman, which examines Pablo Picasso’s thorny politics and raises questions about the role of an artist during wartime. The art historians Pepe Karmel and Patricia Leighton and the theorist Mieke Bal respond.

Two essays examine on art and culture in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France. Judy Sund reads Antoine Watteau’s Les charmes de la vie as a commentary on the ways that nature was domesticated and aestheticized for wealthy Parisians, with the artist standing as mediator between the realms of culture and nature. Meanwhile, Jennifer Olmsted considers how Eugène Delacroix’s The Sultan of Morocco and His Entourage was at odds with the triumphalist paintings of French domination over North Africa that were also on view at the Salon of 1845 in Paris.

This issue of The Art Bulletin also contains four book reviews on Roman visuality, the Buddhist afterlife in art, the Psalter of Saint Louis, and African architecture. Please read the full table of contents for more details.

The Art Bulletin publishes leading scholarship in the English language in all aspects of art history as practiced in the academy, museums, and other institutions. From its founding in 1913, the quarterly journal has published, through rigorous peer review, scholarly articles and critical reviews of the highest quality in all areas and periods of the history of art.

The Art Bulletin Seeks Editor-in-Chief

The Art Bulletin Editorial Board invites nominations and self-nominations for the position of editor-in-chief of The Art Bulletin, for a three-year term, July 1, 2010–June 30, 2013 (preceded by a year as editor designate, from July 1, 2009 to June 30, 2010).

The Art Bulletin comprises scholarly essays and documentation on the history of visual art of all periods and places. The editor-in-chief is responsible for the content and character of the journal. Each issue has approximately 150 editorial pages (135,000 words), not including book and exhibition reviews, which are the responsibility of the reviews editor. The editor-in-chief reads all submitted manuscripts, refers them to appropriate expert referees for scholarly review, provides guidance to authors concerning the form and content of submissions, and makes final decisions regarding acceptance or rejection of articles for publication.

In addition to working with authors, the editor-in-chief attends the three annual meetings of the Art Bulletin Editorial Board—held in the spring and fall in New York and once at the CAA Annual Conference—and submits an annual report to the CAA Board of Directors and editorial board. CAA reimburses the editor-in-chief for travel and lodging expenses for the spring and fall meetings in accordance with its travel policy, but the editor-in-chief pays these expenses to attend the Annual Conference. The editor-in-chief also works closely with the CAA staff in New York, where production for the publication is organized. This is a half-time position. CAA provides financial compensation to the editor’s institution, usually in the form of course release or the equivalent, for three years. The editor is not usually compensated directly.

Candidates must be current CAA members and should not be serving on the editorial board of a competitive journal or on another CAA editorial board or committee. Members may not publish their own work in the journal during the term of service. Nominators should ascertain their nominee’s willingness to serve before submitting a name. Please send a letter describing your interest in and qualifications for appointment, CV, and contact information to: Chair, Art Bulletin Editorial Board, CAA, 275 Seventh Ave., 18th Floor, New York, NY 10001. Deadline: April 15, 2009.

The Art Bulletin Seeks Editorial-Board Members

CAA invites nominations and self-nominations for two individuals to serve on the Art Bulletin Editorial Board for a four-year term, July 1, 2009–June 30, 2013.

The ideal candidate has published substantially in the field and may be an academic, museum-based, or independent scholar; institutional affiliation is not required. Applicants who have specializations in East or South Asian, Renaissance, or early modern European art are especially invited to apply.

The editorial board advises the editor-in-chief and assists him or her to seek authors, articles, and other content for the journal; guides its editorial program and may propose new initiatives for it; performs peer reviews and recommends peer reviewers; and may support fundraising efforts on the journal’s behalf. Members also assist the editor-in-chief to keep abreast of trends and issues in the field by attending and reporting on sessions at the CAA Annual Conference and other academic conferences, symposia, and events in their fields.

Each year the editorial board meets twice in New York and once at the CAA Annual Conference. CAA reimburses members for travel and lodging expenses for the spring and fall New York meetings in accordance with its travel policy, but members pay these expenses to attend the conference.

Candidates must be current CAA members and should not be serving on the editorial board of a competitive journal or on another CAA editorial board or committee. Members may not publish their own work in the journal during the term of service. Nominators should ascertain their nominee’s willingness to serve before submitting a name. Please send a letter describing your interest in and qualifications for appointment, CV, and contact information to: Chair, Art Bulletin Editorial Board, CAA, 275 Seventh Ave., 18th Floor, New York, NY 10001. Deadline: April 15, 2009.